Poet Tongo Eisen-Martin’s cold truths

In a sense, it’s suitable that as someone who is not only a poet, but also a movement worker and educator, Tongo Eisen-Martin speaks with the fascinating mixture of both finely crystallized abstraction and hard reality.

The born-and-bred San Franciscan talks with a certain welcoming casualness, without any air of ostentation, but in his search for the right words, they often stumble out in the form of an incisive, oblique one-liner — the kind you might expect from a poet of his pedigree.

“In many ways, writing is just the art of beating writer’s block,” Eisen-Martin says. It’s a crisp line, but he doesn’t offer it for the sake of some ambiguous snappiness. He’s concisely summing up the way he writes, the way the poems of his astonishing book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” came together and read in a way that’s similar to his speech — intoxicating and slippery, but also borne of the very real.

“I start very small, just kind of with a line or two, or sometimes even just three or four words that are just kind of musical to me, or have an interesting pattern of logic, or have a nice ring to them,” Eisen-Martin says by phone from Toronto just hours before the awards ceremony for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize, for which his book was nominated. “And then I just start to excavate around them. A good line proposes a question, and the next line can answer it a few different ways.”

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The images from his poems are rendered more out of “definition than imagination” — playful pictures or manipulation of convention occurs not for its own sake. “There is a ground to every line,” he says. “It is tethered to a piece of reality.”

One would expect this approach from Eisen-Martin, whose work has involved organizing against police brutality and educating in detention centers at Rikers Island and San Quentin. In “Heaven Is All Goodbyes,” which also won the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry, he paints tragic pictures of death, oppressive systems and cigarettes dragged in order to breathe.

“Men think they are passing around cigarettes/ But really cigarettes are passing around men,” he writes in “May Day.”

Different voices pop in and out constantly, often echoing cold cryptic truths.

“It’s almost like the thousands of strange faces you’ve seen in dreams,” Eisen-Martin says. “You protect them, you assign them a meaning or definition or personality, but they’re just kind of shades. These voices are just kind of like aggressive shades that want to speak to themselves.”

The voices enter and exit without explanation and are part of what makes his poems at once urgent protests and jazz-like puzzles.

“Admittedly, at least in how I relate to poetry, I do have a kind of nonlinear mind. And if you look at a society of oppression, is there even really a Point A to Point B? Where does an oppressed person really go or really end up?” Eisen-Martin says, as if pondering within himself. “Is the aggregate of this society really the sum of journeys? Or is it just a soup that we all swim around in?”

A soup to swim around in might be an appropriate description of his poems. Does that mean Eisen-Martin is concerned about how a poem ought to be interpreted?

“Art has an invincibility to it, but it also has this severe fragility, man,” he says. “If you keep an internal kind of flexibility going, you can create a universe as powerful as the universe. But the moment you try to conspire or wield something, it pops, just like that.”

Another sharp, intangible answer. But he clarifies.

“All that to say, when I sit down to write, I’m just trying to write good lines.”